| Popis: |
The subject of this volume is the situation of literary studies after the post-structuralist breakthrough. The era of a great and single “science of literature”, originating from the same traditions, from a single theory of literature, is a chapter irrevocably closed in the literary studies projects discussed here. At that time, the language of literary studies was governed by the economy of accumulation: literature was treated as an aggregate which multiplied the information output of a message. Which, in turn, justifi ed the incessant excavation work of its interpreters. The closed chapter in the history of literary studies was recorded, in Lyotard’s words, as a grand narrative, legitimising the study of literature in a double sense: research and education. As American academics, publishing in the Bulletin of the Association of English Departments, wrote at the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century: “we’ve lost confi dence that the study of literature means anything” and “we had to get off that high road to the kingdom of light” in which literature was, as Robert Scholes put it, “a quasi-sacred text” and its lecturer “a teacher-preacher”. These shifts, disrupting the previous order of academic disciplines, reverberate through the university. The “idea”, which for the traditional University was a supervising concept, has given way to “technical training” in the service of multinational corporations. The University is changing, moving decisively away from the formula of a university of culture, aiming at the transmission of cultural heritage. There is a shift to a university of excellence, where excellence is measured not by content, but by effectiveness. This is opposed by those who defend the humanities and literary studies, emphasising their role in the foundation of the university and democracy (Readings, Derrida, Nussbaum). Others surrender to the “invisible hand of the market”, trying to save the humanities as a kind of “service provision”, legitimised by neoliberal newspeak. The status of theoretical discourse, which used to be the only legitimate access to the object of “literariness”, has thus changed, and the word “theory“ itself has now become, as Jonathan Culler puts it, a “nickname” for a “puzzling mixture of writings” that challenge disciplinary boundaries. The paradox of this kind of new – let us say, just displaced – status of the discourse of the former discipline, which once could only be legitimately practised by its professionally qualifi ed adepts, is that greater expectations are placed on the side, to put it crudely, of the non-professional. Adapting to the new situation may mean what the title of Easthope’s book calls for: Literary into Cultural Studies, therefore a turn towards cultural studies. The author preceded the thematic part of his dissertation Towards a New Paradigm with a parallel, as it were common, analysis of Heart of Darkness and... Tarzan of the Apes. Terry Eagleton even claims that cultural studies prostitutes literary research, because by entering everyday life as its researchers and admirers, we compliment it, which comes at the cost of losing the ability to criticise it. This general change of perspective reaches such seemingly solid ground of literary studies as poetics, which “in the light of deconstruction” turns out to be not so much a traditional structure of a plan of expression as a structure of the inexpressible. When the time for revision came, poststructuralism demonstrated that even in Jakobson, who imposed a communicative theory of literature, one can fi nd the sentence that poetic utterance “is not really about communication”. Whereas in Jakobson’s classical theory poetics was part of linguistics, the participation of poetics in the construction of heterology in Derrida’s would have to make linguistics part of poetics, a new poetics in which the “word” is experienced not as a representative of the object but as “delaying recognition”, “masking the object”, “replacing it with zero”, perhaps as an “atematic” word. A good poem – and the proof is the perceived pleasure of reading – is a poem after which nothing remains, no remainder, where everything will be “parried”, consumed. Only in a bad poem, in non-poetry, does a residuum of content remain. While the past treated literature as the informative accumulation of a message, the opposite vision is now emerging: literature as a reset. Moving in this direction, we keep coming across new negative terms: literature is associated with waste (potlatch), with the suspension of our natural cognitive attitude towards the world (epoche), with the simulation of the process of signifi cation through its infi nite postponement, “a commentary on its own absence of meaning”, “emptiness” (Derrida). The uncertainty of the discipline’s status can be seen in traditionally “strong” areas of theoretical literary studies, such as narratology. Interpretations of plot now clash with the structuralist tradition seeking a universal logic of plot as langue. The plot itself becomes pluralized in a single text (Barthes), deconstructed when it becomes an unfulfi llable promise, a desire never satisfi ed (Brooks), or an object of negotiation or even a game of appearances masking the semantic immobility of the oppositions that fund it (Kristeva), or fi nally an instrument for perpetuating the patriarchal model of gender relations (de Lauretis). Similar adventures affl ict the traditional history of literature, which no longer maintains itself as a grand narrative, be it a history of ideas or even, as in structuralism, a history of devices (without names). The place of the grand narrative of history is taken by studies of a single, often randomly chosen, year. Similar transformations are taking place in the new thematic fi eld of literary studies, which is gender, with the traditional privileging of masculinity, which is now trying to re-situate itself on the map created by feminist criticism that is deconstructing it. It undergoes this deconstruction, but never loses hope for the possibility of its re-construction, critical of postmodernity. This is countered by proposals to trouble or undoing gender instead of reconstructing it (J. Butler). Meanwhile, the supporters of “science” (in the strong sense) fi nd a patron for the true study of literature in... Darwin, suspending the anti-positivist breakthrough. Paradoxically, all references by literary Darwinists to the ethos of science, critical of post-structuralism, are based on hyperbolised persuasion, as if the sole aim of these statements were to ensure not its scientism, even if only rhetorical, but rather its felicity, understood in Austinian terms. Which, in turn, along with the banality of the Darwinists’ revelations, embarrasses their polemicists. When, at last, the principal author of the new paradigm, Joseph Carroll, presents a scenario in which “The Darwinian literary study [...] will ultimately absorb and supplant every other form of literary study”, all doubt vanishes. Devoid of faith in the “textual world”, characteristic of the post- -structuralist paradigm, the “new humanities” reaches, on the one hand, for agency, and on the other, seeks bridges over the divisions inherited from the anti-positivist breakthrough that isolate it from science. Bridges that connect it with technology (digital humanities), politics, economics, social life (engaged humanities), sciences (cognitive humanities), nature (posthumanities), art (artistic humanities). It seeks its place in teams and laboratories, but also in the politics that is meanwhile making a hostile takeover of its tools. It is in danger of becoming the occupation of “freeloaders”, or of becoming part of marketing. To teach critical self-knowledge again, the new humanities must open the “black boxes” of theory to practice and experimentation. |
